Jashdeep Dhillon, University of California, Berkeley
California is facing a primary care workforce shortage. Although this has been studied at the state level, it is important to understand the downstream health implications: how will this affect the management of chronic illnesses or how will this affect access to primary care? Due to the significance of investing in childhood health, I exploit different healthcare access features (i.e. the number of primary care physicians) across California’s counties with a variety of socioeconomic variables to investigate the effect of the supply of primary care providers on emergency department visits for pediatric asthma. I find that measures of access (in the number of providers) have a negative relationship with the downstream ED visit rates for pediatric asthma.
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